XREAL One Series: World’s first cinematic AR glasses announced

If you’ve been reading for a while, you know I’m always on the hunt for the next big piece of technology that moves the immersion needle.  Whether it’s virtual reality, motion simulation chairs, haptic vests, flight yokes, or driving sim gear, I want to feel like I’m really there.  The latest in that adventure involves augmented reality, or AR.  AR superimposes virtual objects and scenarios into the real world, creating opportunities to play games in entirely new ways, or even making it possible to create virtual workspaces.  A company out of San Francisco called XREAL has been working diligently in this space for the last few years, and today they’ve unveiled their newest iteration of their AR glasses, the XREAL One Series.  The XREAL One Series looks to combine augmented reality, the best in enhanced audio, AI, and enough horsepower to bring it all together.

The first and most obvious use for the XREAL One Series is the spatial display.  Slipping these glasses on to your face reveals a massive projected screen suspended in three dimensional space.  Any device with video-out over USB-C (Pixel 9, Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch, most iPhones, etc.) can throw signal to this virtual screen, allowing you to watch TV, play games, and even work on your computer in pure privacy.  Now, if you’ve used a few of these (and I have), then you might be thinking this is the perfect thing to bring on a plane.  Hold that thought.

The problem with virtual screens, be it on a Quest 3 or an ultra-expensive Apple Vision Pro, is stability.  The natural movement of a car or a plane causes the virtual screen to move in ways that almost guarantee motion sickness.  The XREAL One Series uses their new X1 processor to stabilize this virtual screen, allowing it to be anchored in a way that breaks the motion sickness problem.  Better still, this 3DoF screen is edge to edge, and with a latency of just 3ms at 120Hz, meaning it’s perfect for gaming.  Once upon a time I saw one of their first prototypes running Street Fighter 5 in virtual space, and it was pretty incredible, if a bit laggy and a bit dark.  This newest iteration should be just what the doctor ordered to make virtual gaming without virtual reality on a virtual screen in virtual space virtually effortless, and now at around 700 nits of brightness.

I have several AR and Smart Glasses varieties and another challenge each have is that they have weak audio, with the exception of the newest glasses from Ray Ban.  These new glasses from XREAL are upping the ante with a partnership with Bose.  The fact that it does so in a pair of glasses that are all but indiscernible from a normal pair is downright stunning.  We’ll have to put them through their paces to really test out if they can back that promise, but these should be a lot more than a simple sound slit found on just about any other set of tech glasses.

Previous XREAL glasses had a separate set of sunglasses to darken the lenses a bit for better viewing, or a blackout set of plastic shades that rendered the user unable to see around them, but also made it as dark as a theater.  The XREAL One Series goes high tech with a new electrochromic dimming function to darken or lighten the lenses.  How dark we’ll have to test for ourselves, but that sounds pretty awesome already.

One of the things you need to look at to figure out how comfortable a set of AR or VR glasses will be to use long term is their lens type.  The XREAL One uses a flat-prism lens design, moving away from the “triangular birdbath design”.  This not only makes them far more subtle than previous iterations, but results in a huge improvement to the overall presentation.  Let’s hear it from the team:

XREAL has evolved its advanced proprietary optical engine for XREAL One Series, offering a perfect viewing experience from any angle equal to 1080p Full HD for each eye. XREAL is known for its gigantic cinematic displays and reaches an impressive 50-degree field-of-view (FOV) with XREAL One, which employs a triangular birdbath lens design that achieves a 20.7% larger display area than the XREAL Air 2 series. XREAL One Pro achieves a big industry first by creating the first flat-prism lens design, a change from the traditional triangular birdbath design, and reaching an industry-leading 57-degree FOV. This is an 11mm thin plane that’s 40.9% thinner than traditional birdbath optics and increases the FOV by 23.9% compared to the XREAL Air 2 Series and which produces a 63.6% larger display area than the XREAL Air 2 series.

The team also sought external validation, picking up a TÜV Rheinland Eye Comfort (5 Star) Certification — an assurance from TÜV Rheinland Electrical that these will be safe for your eye health, maintaining eye comfort, even for all-day use like a monitor.

This newest announcement from XREAL reads like a tech wish list for me.  So much of what had the XREAL Air 2 “almost there” sounds like it’s fully solved for this newest product.   We haven’t even gotten to the new frame type, the multi-monitor layout with near-field and far-field capture, transcription, and translation, the 12MB video and photo capture, or the AI that’ll come post-launch.  It’s an exciting time for augmented reality, but it’s an even more exciting time for just being able to bring your games and movies on the go without dealing with invasion of privacy or “single-serving friends”.

The only question that remains is “When and how much?”, and the answer is “soon”.   XREAL One is available for pre-orders now for $499 USD, £449 GBP, €549 Euro through XREAL.com and XREAL’s Amazon store. XREAL One Pro is available for pre-orders now for $599 USD, £549 GBP, €649 Euro through XREAL.com. XREAL One is expected to begin shipping to customers in mid-December and XREAL One Pro is expected to ship to customers in early 2025. Bundles will be available with XREAL One or XREAL One Pro plus XREAL Beam Pro; see XREAL.com for more. The new lineup will be available globally in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Czech, Netherlands, China, Japan, and Korea. They will come to XREAL retail partners soon, including Micro Center stores in the US, Selfridges stores in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin, and retail partners in Korea, Japan and China.

We’re working with XREAL to request a set of these, so stay tuned for our eyes-on review soon.  The future is now, and I couldn’t be more excited.

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